Yeah I don't really understand what the big deal is. I realize that there are a lot of families that may be suffering but because they were on an airplane it is somehow more newsworthy than a cruise ship with 10 times as many people, or genocide in Malaysia or doctors being killed giving polio vaccines in Afghanistan? Oh it's an airplane, let's tap into the 9/11 terrorist fear mongering so that we can get ratings!

The deal is that CNN has become a massive piece of shit. I have no idea either why this plane has translated to huge ratings, but it's a sad state of affairs when the news, which is supposed to tell the public what it needs to know, instead tells it what it WANTS to know-- which is apparently pandering, sensationalist, exploitative bullshit.

Bread and circuses. Watching these people who went to journalism school cover the missing plane, you can see their souls dying and the spark of integrity extinguished

The problem is 24 hour news stations. It would take a global army of non-lazy old-school journalists to get enough fresh content for a 24 hour news station (costing tens of millions of dollars in salaries alone - coming straight out of some exec's megayacht fund!), and then a lot of people wouldn't care about news of what's happening in some place that has no relevance to their lives so it wouldn't pay off.

So news stations are always hungry for generic filler content (human interest stories, or intense discussion over inconsequential BS such as almost everything on MH370), and when they're not, they spend their time trying to whip up interest over something people don't currently care about one iota - the Blackfish movie is a perfect example. Funded by and premiered on CNN. They throw these things at the wall often but most don't stick, and amount to nothing but more filler content, which is OK for them.

But the plane wasn't filler-- it dominated their 24-hour network for months. They sold it as a thriller mystery. It pushed out all kinds of real news-- the invasion in Ukraine, for example.

The plane episode to me really was the symbolic death rattle for mainstream American news media, a clear message that it is completely dead. We deserve much better-- as the last superpower (at least for another few years) it should be the citizen's duty to stay well-informed, but we're so ill-served by the mass media an

you keep blaming your american news services of reporting crap,so stop using them,do what others do,look else where and try to get news from as many different sources as possible,most folk can afford internet access

The problem is 24 hour news stations. It would take a global army of non-lazy old-school journalists to get enough fresh content for a 24 hour news station (costing tens of millions of dollars in salaries alone - coming straight out of some exec's megayacht fund!), and then a lot of people wouldn't care about news of what's happening in some place that has no relevance to their lives so it wouldn't pay off.

So news stations are always hungry for generic filler content (human interest stories, or intense discussion over inconsequential BS such as almost everything on MH370), and when they're not, they spend their time trying to whip up interest over something people don't currently care about one iota - the Blackfish movie is a perfect example. Funded by and premiered on CNN. They throw these things at the wall often but most don't stick, and amount to nothing but more filler content, which is OK for them.

Typical of the Liberal Press.

They should have been devoting all that coverage to something that people really care about: Benghazi.

That doesn't really explain CNN's obsession with mh370 though: CNN's nonstop coverage of "A plane is missing" has been going on for months. In that time, Ebola has broken out, some celebrity somewhere has undoubtedly died, and Russia invaded Ukraine. Yet CNN KEEPS coming back to "BREAKING FUCKING NEWS, HOLD ON TO YOUR SEAT: THE PLANE!!! IT'S STILL MISSING!!!" It's clearly not about filler. Ebola would have made a much sexier story. Since it's all pundits, they wouldn't need to change anything, just ask the people in front of the camera to speculate on whether we're all going to die of Ebola rather than where they think the plane crashed.

At this point, I think CNN is staying with the flight because they think anyone still watching CNN is actually hooked on the dizzying highs that come along with watching yet another computer generated line over the indian ocean while some self-proclaimed expert on airplanes guesses about what was going on when the plane hit the water. Meanwhile people who actually want to know the news have switched over to the internet. It's the same approach other specialized cable channels are taking: The Learning Channel has realized that anyone who wants to learn anything tuned out long ago, but they can cling to some viewers with stupid shows like Honey Boo Boo. Not just filling time: addictive to some moron with eyeballs.

Aside: a couple of months ago I was called to be in a jury pool and I sat in the jury room with CNN on the TV. It was absolute torture. I could try to read, or look at the floor or at the other potential jurors, but I just couldn't block out the audio. People watch that voluntarily?

I thought that once when stuck in a waiting room with Fox with the constant interspersion of editorial comments when reporting news. But then in the meantime all the cable channels have followed them down to lowest level. Now I can't think of any modern American news channel I'd want to be forced to listen to in a waiting room, they're all essentially crap.

I was with you until your Blackfish comment. That IMO is *exactly* what CNN should be focusing on. If I want breaking news nowadays I'm not getting it from CNN scroller. TV news networks have the ability to take on long form documentaries that can go indepth and be visual and appealing. Blackfish and Pandora's Promise were fantastic and a hell of a lot of people cared about the former.

I havent seen Pandora's Promise, but it really sickened me that Blackfish had the headlines and the world's attention for a few weeks while there were 1 or 2 genocides going on and NK's prison camps were just getting UN attention. This has nothing to do with the merit of Blackfish as a documentary, it's that CNN thought a discussion over the ethics of whale captivity was the most newsworthy thing going on at the time.

The thing is, CNN made it big initially because of this format. However what they did was repeat the main news of the day continuously rather than only at 5pm and 11pm. So it was good for travellers in hotels, or if you wanted to get caught up in the news in the morning, and so forth. Even better for genuine stories that take lots of time to tell, such as breakout of war in Iraq or 9/11. But over time CNN and other stations kept trying to recreate the big story format out of stuff that wasn't a big stor

CNN hasn't had news for about 8 years now. Or at least on "headline news" there's no news and only talking heads and you had to head to main CNN site to get headlines, but even that has declined. Somebody high in CNN management seems to want to recreate a tabloid style of journalism, and believes that this missing plane story is the next OJ Trial.

The big deal is it's a story which lends itself perfectly to endless speculation. CNN can waste hours of its news cycle wheeling out pundits to explain how aircraft work, how transponders work, how accidents happen, how terrorists hijack planes, how the planes crash, how planes are found, how blackboxes work, how debris fields spread etc. In the absence of hard information, they and their guests can prattle on for days or weeks like this.

it also doesn't help that the news organizations have managed to frame it as a classic, "whodunit," with bad-actors in the forms of the regional governments that wouldn't disclose what they knew, the failure of cooperation by the airline and its poor behavior regarding the families of the passengers, the contrary evidence for what happened, and the rather large number of employees of Freescale.

The problem isn't that the questions are being asked, the problem is that conclusions are being drawn, which are

We know that a plane disappeared when transitioning between airspaces controlled by different, somewhat antagonistic governments. We know that the plane's transponder was shut off at just this moment, requiring knowledge of the route and the procedures to turn off the transponder. We know that the plane continued to fly for some time based on the engine reporting systems the parties disabling the transponder neglected to turn off.

That's all we know.

We know an approximate distance from the satellite that the engine reporting systems reached before not reporting anymore. We think that, several days later, indications of the cockpit voice and data recorders were picked up in the vicinity of a very, very deep part of the ocean, a place that is close to, but not exactly where the engine reporting systems last reported the plane's position.

This is more conjecture based on data from the system - possibly accurate, possibly not - as they invented a whole new method of interpretting the data to determine this information. It has yet to be proven a valid method of interpretation.

For all we know, it could (i) be at the bottom of the ocean, or (ii) be shutdown, hidden by a nefrarious force (f.e Al Quaida or similar group; or even a not-so-nefrarious force - North Korea, etc.). Problem is, we won't know until it shows up agai

Well, I cut my satellite and now use Roku. And apparently there are no news channels I can get there worth watching (just waiting for the bbc channel to start working). I can get Fox though, or RK, or other innately biased channels. What's surprising though is that I'm not really missing the news channels because their quality had diminished so much. I can read the paper at work, read the bbc RSS feeds, and so on.

Yeah I don't really understand what the big deal is. I realize that there are a lot of families that may be suffering but because they were on an airplane it is somehow more newsworthy than a cruise ship with 10 times as many people, or genocide in Malaysia or doctors being killed giving polio vaccines in Afghanistan? Oh it's an airplane, let's tap into the 9/11 terrorist fear mongering so that we can get ratings!

*sigh*

To an extent I can agree with you, but there is one very large fundamental difference between genocide in Malaysia or a cruise ship with shitters that won't flush.

In those cases, we know what the fuck happened. We know where it is happening regardless if it is ignored or not by the first world.

In the case of one of the largest airliners ever built flying over a planet who's global telecommunications infrastructure is nothing sort of remarkable, we have no fucking clue how it simply vanished.

I disagree that it's newsworthy. It has nothing to do with being a sheep -- turn your energy to the education, disease (due to anti-vaxxers) or net neutrality issues we're having domestically. We have such larger problems to fix that a missing airplane halfway across the world shouldn't even register on the scale. But it's a convenient distraction from our own problems so it's good 'infotainment'.

If you think I'm a sheep because I don't give a shit about an electrical fire [wired.com] in an airplane, you're amazingl

I don't watch CNN so I have no idea how sensationalized their coverage has been. HOWEVER any time you have several nations devoting so much of their resources in a joint effort that was cobbled together as rapidly as their response has been, that IS a major story. CNN was definitely doing the right thing in getting on this, and in following it.

That said, so far they may have missed much of the significance of what was happening. When elements of the USA armed forces and the Chinese armed forces act jointly under the direction of Australia, yes, there are definitely stories there. It might be that CNN missed the boat on where the focus should be. Or it might be that they have been preparing documentary coverage behind the scenes, while using the day to day "infotainment" coverage to pay the enormous daily costs of developing the larger, more noteworthy, stories.

I expect that in the upcoming months we will see a documentary or two describing how a multinational search effort was thrown together on a moment's notice. I think there must have been some fancy dancing going on between Generals and Admirals of different nations, and CNN has-- probably deliberately-- positioned its news-gathering assets where they can document the events as they were happening.

The coverage is non-stop is part of the problem. Even if there is nothing new to report in one day about MH370, CNN will spend 20 hours talking about it. I could understand if they spend 5 minutes in every hour talking about the plane, instead they spend 55 minutes every hour talking about it, with 45 minutes of that being speculation and the remaining 10 minutes reviewing the few things we already know.

There are more important things happening than talking about this missing plane. What about Syria, Ukr

So CNN is trying something new and risky by focusing all its assets on one story? Can you not just change the channel every now and then to get the other news of the day?

Let's see where this goes rather than bitching and moaning because CNN has broken free from the herd and is doing something the other news companies aren't doing. Maybe CNN is pioneering a new and better approach. Maybe they are just another pioneer that dies lost in the desert. Either way

It is newsworthy, but not to the extent that is merits the constant coverage CNN has been giving it.

But it's easy to see why they're stuck on this particular story. It garners ratings but requires minimal financial and personnel commitment on CNN's part. There's nowhere to send reporters but the local harbor to pointlessly demonstrate some bit of tech. They could send reporters to Malaysia, but why bother when other news agencies are doing the real work for them? The fact that it's politically neutral is an

Is it 24 hours worth of newsworthy? Is it newsworthy enough that it is worth focusing exclusively on that one story while ignoring everything else that's happening in the world? If they can spend all their time on this mystery, then should they also spend all their time on other more mundane mysteries? Can't they just spend 10 seconds every day saying "sorry, no new information on MH370 today, we now return you to our WWIII coverage"?

Having gotten involved in arguments about it on multiple mainstream news sites, yeah, people really bought into them. Some because they were establishment, some because they described themselves as pro-science, many because they pointed to the company already making money with their technology, etc. The voices saying 'this is bullshit' were mostly drowned out or shouted down.

The company hasn't released enough information for you to know it's bullshit. Scientists aren't supposed to debunk things by saying "well I've never heard of anything like that so it must be impossible." Science has a hard time advancing in a climate like that.

That said, they haven't proven any of their claims. If they had done any of the things they said they've done on their website, they would tell you who their customer was so you could look them up and ask them if it was true. Basic fact-checking like

Actually, their web site lists the Ukrainian patent numbers for their technique. Now, you can't just look that up online, but various other surveying firms from Eastern Europe - many of them with the same staff as Georesonance - have included images of the same patents in their presentations and web sites. They describe a form of remote sensing that is categorically bullshit. If you look up the names of some of the people involved with Georesonance's sister companies using the same patents, you will find th

I've mentioned [slashdot.org] that remote sensing of this kind would be a spectacular leap forward, if it existed. Of course, the default in absence of any evidence of their methods working (which I doubted from the beginning would ever emerge) is this whole thing being a fraud.

If it makes you feel better, they aren't using it just to get attention. They're using it gain notoriety and legitimacy so they can scam property owners out of money by offering fake prospecting services.

True words. It might be easier to believe the Korean ferry sank when it struck the wreckage of MH370.And that it was done on purpose to conceal the jet under the ferry.This will probably anger Gamera.You won't like Gamera when he's angry.

Seriously, how can "skepticism grow" about something that had almost no basis for belief in the first place?

I don't understand it either. It is a fact whether or not the plane is where they claim it is. Either it is there, or it is not (or both, depending on who you ask ). Instead of trying to convince people or being skeptical or whatever, how about someone just look? There's not a free sub or boat capable of scanning the ocean floor that can head out there and look? Why bother having a debate about a fact when you can just verify what the actual fact is?

Can you blame people for seeking alternative answers? Keep in mind, the agencies discrediting this company were the same agencies that didn't think it necessary to put a simple satellite GPS transponder on jets to keep track of where their quarter of a billion dollar plane is or put about $100 worth of batteries in their blackbox so it would ping for more than a few weeks. This entire mystery wouldn't exist if they'd spent an extra $1000 on a $261 million dollar piece of equipment. It's hard to discredit an idiot when you yourself are an idiot.

There is a difference between scammers shilling impossible technology and big companies that are too cheap, short sighted, or lazy to install additional equipment for rare situations. One is a lier, the other is playing the odds and just happened to loose this time.

Can you blame people for seeking alternative answers? Keep in mind, the agencies discrediting this company were the same agencies that didn't think it necessary to put a simple satellite GPS transponder on jets to keep track of where their quarter of a billion dollar plane is or put about $100 worth of batteries in their blackbox so it would ping for more than a few weeks. This entire mystery wouldn't exist if they'd spent an extra $1000 on a $261 million dollar piece of equipment. It's hard to discredit an idiot when you yourself are an idiot.

Extra batteries would increase the size and weight of the blackbox. The design costs, testing costs, and fuel costs of transporting a larger box would likely far exceed $1000 for every plane produced. I'm not saying you're being unreasonable, just that you are underestimating the costs involved. The 777 had all of the equipment it needed to report its location to a satellite on a regular basis. Older planes may not have all that equipment, however.

No it doesn't. Give me a couple hundred dollars and I'll run down to radioshack and get enough parts to make you an always-on, fire proof, self charging GPS transponder that phones in its location every few minutes. Self-contained, inside an insulated box with 10 year batteries and you could glue it anywhere on the plane not accessible to passengers or crew while in flight. Make it charge via induction and viola, it's not even part of the planes induction system. Hell, you could do the entire thing with Ar

No it doesn't. Give me a couple hundred dollars and I'll run down to radioshack and get enough parts to make you an always-on, fire proof, self charging GPS transponder that phones in its location every few minutes. Self-contained, inside an insulated box with 10 year batteries and you could glue it anywhere on the plane not accessible to passengers or crew while in flight. Make it charge via induction and viola, it's not even part of the planes induction system. Hell, you could do the entire thing with Arduino parts. I had to check to make sure they had a 2-way satellite link but sure enough they do. My creation would weigh under a pound and be extremely cheap... if I actually etched my own boards and what-not I could get it smaller than a cellphone. This is a very simple problem to solve.

Again the true costs of such a project revolve around the time and money it would take to get the transponder FAA certified, satellite up-link time, and the cost of retrofitting the device onto existing aircraft. Like I said, they could have had tracking on this aircraft from Boeing for something on the order of $15,000 per aircraft per year. The airline opted out. Granted that tracking service is mostly for maintenance purposes, but it would have given us the lat/long of the aircraft on a regular interv

Also, if you had a missing relative lost at sea, you might start dealing in lots of nonsense. Tragedy has that affect on people when they are left with little to no information about what's happening to them. Which was the point of my post.

$100 worth of batteries will cost several million dollars worth of fuel over the life of an aircraft. Plus a few hundred thousand for the added maintenance, testing, and engineering. It's not the unit cost of the equipment, it's the cost it takes to actually fly that equipment halfway around the world on a regular basis. There is a reason next day air shipping on a 50 lb box is a couple hundred dollars.

Can you blame people for seeking alternative answers? Keep in mind, the agencies discrediting this company were the same agencies that didn't think it necessary to put a simple satellite GPS transponder on jets to keep track of where their quarter of a billion dollar plane is or put about $100 worth of batteries in their blackbox so it would ping for more than a few weeks. This entire mystery wouldn't exist if they'd spent an extra $1000 on a $261 million dollar piece of equipment. It's hard to discredit an idiot when you yourself are an idiot.

It's actually worse than that. ALL the stuff you need (except for the extra batteries for the black boxes) was already on the aircraft. The only thing they needed was to pay the $15K/year subscription fees so they could get the maintenance data from the aircraft in flight, anywhere in the world.

put about $100 worth of batteries in their blackbox so it would ping for more than a few weeks.

When was the last time we lost a large commercial jetliner for so long that the batteries ran out before we picked up the ping? When was the last time we had one fly so far off its planned flight path, intentionally evading radar, and probably crashed half way around the globe from its intended destination? This case is so out of the ordinary, it wouldn't have made sense to plan for it (up until now). Sure, lets throw another $100 worth of batteries into it. But what if that wasn't enough? Lets throw anothe

This entire mystery wouldn't exist if they'd spent an extra $1000 on a $261 million dollar piece of equipment.

That's not true. There are already several things on the plane and off that could have been used to determine where the plane was. On the plane, they were turned off. Who's to say they wouldn't have turned off another piece of installed equipment?
Off the plane, nobody bothered to track it with information that was available. Probably because nobody thought it would disappear, and it wasn't about to run into somebody else's plane.

I found it odd that the plane's axis was on a perfect north / south line. To me it looks exactly like there is a few "pixel" (or whatever the individual data points are) anomaly in a vertical line, probably from whatever sensing instrument generated the raw data. It reminds me of the type of wildly divergent data points you see when a gamma ray hits a sensor type thing. Then all the various "shapes" they produce from the data that supposedly represent the different types of metal, etc, are merely the res

If the patents behind the technique are accurate, the "sensing instrument" is a print-out of satellite imagery that is then put in a bag with some blank film and subjected to abuse at a gamma-ray source. The previously-blank film is then developed.

Posting this to prevent me from exercising mod points on an article I submitted. That's just too much power for one person.

This is just "normal news cycle". First they tout some small report and describe it as an amazing new technology that can solve Mystery X. They bring on pundit after pundit describing the technology and wondering why the officials are ignoring such an obviously useful tool. When they've wrung all the airtime they can out of the story, they switch to "debunk mode" and show how the technology is garbage and the people behind it are scammers who are wasting our time and money. Then pundit after pundit come

Watch as CNN devotes a week of reporting to a company that specializes in clairvoyance and Remote Viewing to tell us where the plane went. Following that, an interview with the leader of the Raëlians to tell us exactly which aliens abducted them, as well as a special segment on lizard people.

Skepticism was all high from those which took the extra step of *checking* what georesonnance pretended to be doing. We aren't speaking of P3C flying over the bengal bay and detecting something, we are speaking of a company pretending that magnetic field (as small as needing a P3C boom M.A.D. to be detected in normal usage) left enough trace on a photo to detect something (or heck a negative) that was BS from the start.

A friend of mine, a former pilot, told me an interesting theory. There is no interest whatsoever in "finding" the plane, just for the reason that if not found, there are no compensations due to the family of the victims...

There was an article a couple of weeks back around the time the pings were supposedly detected where the Malaysian government wanted to start the process of declaring the passengers dead so the compensation process could start and the families threw their toys out of the cot.

The decision to declare the passengers dead is independent of finding the wreckage and can be done without proof of death, although having the passengers show up alive later can be embarrassing and difficult to correct. There is an agr

Latest efforts are focusing in on 2 passengers, a Doctor "Doc" Brown and his apprentice, a Mr. Martin "Marty" McFly. Rumor has it the 2 carried on enough batteries to generate 1.21 gigowatts of electricity, and that the plane slowed to a dangerous 88 miles per hour just before it went missing.

2. Emergency procedures are "Fly the plane, Navigate, Communicate" (in that order). So the pilots did the following tasks, in this order:

a. Pull all the breakers they could in hopes of stopping the fire, disabling the radios and transponder.

b. Turn towards the nearest suitable landing location by punching in two way-points in to the flight director.

c. Gain altitude if the fire is not going out, to try and starve it of O2.

3. At this point, I assume they lost control of the cabin altitude or where driven from their seats by smoke/flames or where disabled by fumes. There is only about 20 min of supplemental O2 for passengers, slightly more for crew. Everybody was unconscious in about half an hour and dead within two if the cabin altitude went too high, or everybody died from smoke inhalation as the fire/smoke spread.

4. The plane files on the flight director's last instructions, passes though/over the two way-points then just flies on unguided until the fuel was exhausted,

5. When the engines stop, the plane descends into the water and sinks relatively in tact.

This is simple, straight forward, and matches what we know. The only assumption being made is the in flight fire and the damage it caused leading to the disabling of the passengers/crew. Everything else is either standard procedure, or based on how the aircraft's systems function.

I think that is the more likely scenario, but in that case the plane flies on its last known heading from radar and doesn't turn south.

The south turn is explained by the pilots entering 2 way-points, one that sends them towards their intended destination but not directly there, but to an approach fix to the north of their destination. The second point was designed to to send them closer to the airport on a heading similar to the runway's heading. This is standard pilot stuff that most people don't immediately think about, but you don't want to just head to the airport, you need to get yourself positioned so that you can approach the runw

My point again. There was at least one person alive that knew how to fly the airplane that made the course corrections to avoid radar.
You don't avoid radar if you are under duress of a hijacking or looking for an airport to land at because of fire. You are avoiding radar because you don't want to be found. Then again, (as the parent states and the grandparent see differently) maybe the pilot was taking the plane to Africa to sell for parts, and the two people aboard had nothing to do with it.
It will still be found off the coast of Africa because it ran out of fuel.

I don't think so. The change of heading could have been planned. The south heading would be similar to both the emergency destination runway's heading and their departing runway heading. Landing large aircraft takes advanced planning and a pilot who was planning to make an emergency landing would be planning for it. You want to land on a long runway, into the wind, and in an emergency you don't want to waste time, so you are going to be planning your flight path, so it's not unusual to get all that punc

Who would really want a plane anyhow. Unless it's among some of the concepts like "repaint and fly into building", I think that the passengers might be more useful as hostages for ransom or some other such thing.

Who would really want a plane anyhow. Unless it's among some of the concepts like "repaint and fly into building", I think that the passengers might be more useful as hostages for ransom or some other such thing.

I think we've seen proof that this "Fly into Building" idea really doesn't require the "Repaint" trouble. Who can tell what the paint job is at 10 miles and how would you park it someplace where the paint mattered? Just load them up with fuel and they will do plenty of damage. So I agree, steeling a large commercial airplane is pretty much a non-starter as far as reasonable plans go, it's just way too much trouble.

"Fact 1. There were two people on the plane headed to Europe. You don't go to Europe via China."

You certainly can, particularly if you're just looking for the cheapest fare. The travel agency in Thailand which booked the tickets said that they got a request for the cheapest tickets. Not for a specific carrier, or even a specific flight.

Just for shits and giggles, I pulled up a Kayak search, one-way, KL to Amsterdam (which is the route they were both booked on), on May 14th. Lo and behold, the second chea